Mother’s Day

Mother’s Day designed for me

Mother’s day for me is just that, a day for mother’s or my day! I decided to just do whatever I wanted to do. Which is in the complete opposite of mother mode behavior, lol!!

For the third year, I attended the Annual Swiss Ave Home Tours here in Dallas, Texas. Swiss Avenue is a gem of a bygone neighborhood surrounded by the city. A storied historical niche where most of the homes go back to the turn of the century long ago built by oil and railroad barons. The homes are all very diverse in design from Victorian mansions to Rocco palaces as well as palatial tributes to the Gilded Age. You may see anything from The Great Gatsby to the Beverly Hillbillies down there. It is truly is a visual feast.

The streets are extra wide with 100-year-old Oak and Magnolia trees forming the shade around you. Kids on Swiss Avenue still run lemonade stands and swing on tires attached to the massive trees in their front yards.

It’s an entire day spent moving at your own pace to select homes on a map. There you can hear preservation specialists give the history of the home, listen to the architects generally present tell their stories of restoration or even meet the occasional owner hanging out in the kitchen.

There was music, food from prominent restaurants and high end specialty vendors whose wares were also tied into design and art. Best of all there were plenty of seats and old fashioned hand fans where you could sit comfortably under a tree and just listen to jazz while soaking in a gorgeous landscape.

If you love art, history, architecture, design or just watch a lot of HGTV this was an overdrive for the senses. Esthetically I saw a lot of mixing old with new as well observing the art of minimization in design which I clearly don’t follow myself.

It was a perfect day doing what I love and sharing it with the people I love. I so appreciate my husband for walking block upon block and up and down stairs to every home, I wanted to view. And my daughter who followed along took a ton of selfies and understood in real time the power of classic design through the years.